Published as Journal of Applied Geophysics, 119, 99-105, (2015)

Enhancing seismic reflections using empirical mode decomposition in the flattened domain

Yangkang Chen, Guoyin Zhang, Shuwei Gan, and Chenglin Zhang
Bureau of Economic Geology
John A. and Katherine G. Jackson School of Geosciences
The University of Texas at Austin
University Station, Box X
Austin, TX 78713-8924
Email: ykchen@utexas.edu

State Key Laboratory of Petroleum Resources and Prospecting
China University of Petroleum
Fuxue Road 18th
Beijing, China, 102200
guoyinzh@126.com

Exploration and Development Institute of Southwest Oil & Gasfield Company,
PetroChina oil Company
Jianshe North Road (Section 1), No. 83, Chengdu, China, 610041
zclcup@163.com

School of Electronic and Information Engineering
Hebei University of Technology
Xiping Road No. 5340, Beichen District
Tianjin, China, 300401
zyt@hebut.edu.cn

Abstract:

Due to different reasons, the seismic reflections are not continuous even when no faults or no discontinuities exist. We propose a novel approach for enhancing the amplitude of seismic reflections and making the seismic reflections continuous. We use plane-wave flattening technique to provide horizontal events for the following empirical mode decomposition (EMD) based smoothing in the flattened domain. The inverse plane-wave flattening can be used to obtain original curved events. The plane-wave flattening process requires a precise local slope estimation, which is provided by the plane-wave destruction (PWD) algorithm. The EMD based smoothing filter is a non-parametric and adaptive filter, thus can be conveniently used. Both pre-stack and post-stack field data examples show tremendous improvement for the data quality, which makes the following interpretation easier and more reliable.